Topic: Law and Order
What Does a Free Market Require? I retract all articles I have written that espouse anarcho-capitalism. I erroneously thought all human actions (all products and services) needed to be provided and obtained only through the free market. There are many preconditions for the proper ordering of society, a rational society. The market is not at the head of the list. The market does not encompass everything. There are three services that cannot be market services, for they are the things that make a free market possible.by Peter Namtvedt
(libertarian)
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
A time comes for almost anyone to make a retraction. While I have tried to develop and utter a consistent political and economic philosophy, over the last few months I found my grand ideas on these topics developing a crack. It cut across many conclusions to which I had come. Rather than enumerating them and stating corrections to each of them on every online zine for which I had written, I present one summary retraction here and at one other website.
I now recognize I was wrong to espouse anarchism or anarcho-capitalism.
Ways to Order Society
Which comes first, a rational social order or the free market?
Ayn Rand wrote, in "The Objectivist Ethics" ( The Virtue of Selfishness) , "The principle of trade is the only rational ethical principle for all human relationships, personal and social, private and public, spiritual and material. It is the principle of justice. "
Given that the normal or proper relations between men is trade, or a life oriented by the Trader Principle, it would seem that the primary outgrowth of Objectivist ethics in the social sphere is economics. The market might seem to be the primary way that social order would be achieved. Everything necessary for man's life qua man would work through the market, all products and services required, rather than organizing everything through a government. Moreover, historically the actions of government result in harm to the free market, the destruction of trade.
Before we face the question of what government is good for, let us first look at the requirements of having a market, a free market. I now find that not all products and services need to be provided by competing agencies. Indeed, some must not be thus provided to us.
Order through Creative Disorder?
Is it conceivable that multiple police agencies could help create order? What would two such agencies do when accusations fly between subscribers to their respective police services? If they were truly free market services, it would be contradictory to put in place a higher level agency as a court of appeals, with one ultimate highest level court being the place of final appeal. An appeals process abandons competition in a free market. All of the police agencies may as well be, and must be, part of one monolithic institution.
Competing police agencies are not logical in one person's local sphere of activity. One person would not be happy with two or more such agencies claiming jurisdiction over his private property. Nor would it work very well if several such agencies had competing domains among the various people with whom a person does business. That would be true also for ordinary immediate neighbors. It would be preferable, indeed, necessary for the whole of a given geographic area to be served by one police agency. It would be best to not live next door to or to do business with someone who insists on adhering to a different legal system than to yours.
It would likewise be necessary that these police forces serve as officers of one court, not distinctly separate and competing courts.
Although it is workable to have several layers of such services, each with its own domain ranging from local matters, to issues that encompass larger and more distant interactions, police and courts within their local or national jurisdictions, need to operate under one legal system. Competing agencies applying different laws with different processes cannot be said to be supplying objective law.
Objective Legal System
For a free market to be possible a legal system needs to be objective. The laws need to be objective and the application of the laws need to be objective processes.
What are the earmarks of an objective legal system? (The first eight are derived from Lon Fuller's The Morality of Law)
Laws are enacted no spur of the moment creation of law during trials;
Laws are publicized, or at least made available to the affected party (what rules he is expected to observe);
Laws are never retroactive (except for a rare correction to previous bad laws), which not only cannot itself guide action, but undercuts the integrity of rules prospective in effect, since it puts them under the threat of retrospective change;
Laws must be understandable rules;
Laws must not be contradictory rules (or too voluminous tens of thousands of laws arguably will mean the system includes contradictory ones);
Laws must not require conduct beyond the powers of the affected party;
Laws must not introducing such frequent changes in the rules that the subject cannot orient his action by them;
Laws must achieve congruence between the rules as announced and their actual administration the laws must apply just as strongly to the government as to the citizens;
The application of laws must be by an objective process, where conviction requires that the evidence must determined beyond a reasonable doubt, and that the resolution of a conviction is to make the victim whole, by restitution, rather than being a process motivated by government's need for fees and fines.
Creation of law the legislative process must presume in favor of the liberty of the citizens rather than the automatic constitutionality of whatever the lawmakers propose. The process must determine by facts and by reason new rules when they will better protect individual rights, while at the same time not harming the liberty of anyone else.
In order to achieve this, a government must be created (or changed) that is severely limited in powers. This may require tightly limited funding, a greater separation of powers, with elected officials being subject to a feasible process of recall, possibly including a branch that provides a special representation of the people, able to mount court challenges to any government branch acts that it deems harmful to individual rights. Extreme age requirements might be put in place for the executive branch, with lifetime terms, but with ability of the people or several other branches of government to recall them (compare the thousand-year reign of the Doges of the Italian city-states).
Conclusion
There are three services that do not lend themselves to being sold in an open market, but must rather be supplied by one institution in a given geographical area. These three express the power or right of self-defense that we need to delegate to an objective institution (except in emergencies), in order to achieve the social order that makes markets possible.
It is a requirement for achieving and maintaining a free market, that a people within a given geographical area are rational enough to create an objective legal system and an objective defense system. This requires a limited monoply republican form of government. The limits such a government must operated under must be even more strict than those of any government we have known to date. It requires a written constitution that begins with clear instructions as to how it is to be interpreted, with all terms well defined, with more checks and balances, more separation of powers than have ever been imposed on any government, as well as other guarantees that it remains limited, with strictly limited funding. It requires a servant, a night-watchman government, and an ever-vigilant People.
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The views expressed in this
article are those of Peter Namtvedt only and do not represent
the views of Nolan Chart, LLC or its affiliates. Peter Namtvedt is
solely responsible for the contents of this article and is not an
employee or otherwise affiliated with Nolan Chart, LLC in his/her role as a columnist.
Don't be so quick to retract on anarcho-capitalism. The majority of libertarian theorists and scholars adhere to it, and I would be very suprised if they were not able to satisfactorily answer your questions here.
So, my advice is to keep an open-mind and keep learning.
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"Government, the rule of some men over others by initiated force, is a form of slavery. To advocate government is to advocate slavery. To advocate limited government is to put oneself in the ridiculous position of advocating limited slavery.” The Market for Liberty, by Morris and Linda Tannehill
Patrick is right. Ignore the layperson. Look at the theorists and scholars. The majority are "zero-government." Just check out LewRockwell.com and Mises.org for examples.
I don't know enough about anarcho-capitalism to debate you here. But, are you correct and the the scholars and theorists wrong? It's possible, but I doubt it.
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